dress/belt and heels: Target
cardigan: thrifted
necklace: Jane
watch: secondhand (Coach)
Do you guys remember when pattern mixing was A Thing? A few years ago, it was all the rage with bloggers, right up there with color blocking and arm parties. I personally wasn't disappointed to see color blocking go the way of the dodo, as they say, but I think pattern mixing is a fairly classic trend.
I bought this dress back in early summer when it became apparent that I had five weddings on my calendar for 2015 and no appropriate dresses that hadn't already been seen by those particular social crowds. It's great for work too, though, and in the winter it's perfect with a pair of black tights. Although we're still facing unseasonably warm temps, so I feel like I could still get away with wearing this with nude hose if I wanted to. Craziness!
In other news, I now have a second blog (because maintaining one lately isn't enough). You can follow my adventures in portrait photography over at Elfie Photography, my business site. And hey, if you're looking for a newborn or family photographer in Columbus, Ohio, I'm your gal! Mention this blog to get 20% off your first session :)
So the last few weeks have been something of a whirlwind. I was completely overwhelmed with the task of finishing and mailing our wedding invitations; I left a few things (like getting the dang things printed, ahem) to the last minute and found myself scrambling to get them sent out in time. Granted, they still technically went out "early" — eight weeks instead of four to six — but our hotel block's cutoff is in about a week and I wanted to make sure everyone who wanted a room could get one.
Anyway, I designed them, fretted until the last minute about said design, said "screw it" and just sent them to be printed, was disappointed to see that they turned out purple instead of navy blue, said "screw it" again and started stuffing, stamping, addressing and sealing. The addressing took forever; I wanted them to look fancy, so I bought a calligraphy pen and promptly regretted that decision. After much trial and error, they turned out okay. I ordered 25 more envelopes than I needed and with mistakes, I ended up with one to spare. That's what I call luck. I then proceeded to stay up until 2 a.m. last Friday, stuffing, licking and stamping 125 envelopes. Have you ever licked 125 envelopes by yourself? It sucks.
But aren't they pretty?
A little obsessed with the lettering on this one. For some reason, I just love it. You can see my secret, too: Write it in pencil first, trace over with the calligraphy pen and India ink, then erase the pencil when the ink dries.
On top of all that, Matt was gone for two weeks to do a training in Colorado. I wasn't jealous or lonely at all. He came back on Saturday, and I'm still trying to get back into some semblance of a schedule. I kind of devolved into bachelorettehood while he was gone. I didn't hate it, but I much prefer having him around ;)
I've also been SERIOUSLY slacking on the outfit photo front lately. Something about the frigid temps and the snow lately have just crushed my motivation. I'm dressing for comfort, not style, which has meant leggings under slacks, three layers of shirts, big sweaters and generally shapeless silhouettes.
I did manage to dress nicely on a semi-warm (read: temps in the 20s instead of single digits) day last month. I straight-up copied this pin, but honestly, I was just glad to bust out my beloved maxi skirt and look somewhat pulled together again.
sweater: H&M
oxford: thrifted
maxi skirt, kitten heels: Target
necklace: giveaway win (originally from Nordstrom)
Just realized you can see my remote in the last photo. The illusion is shattered! Womp womp. Anyway, there's my secret to wearing skirts in winter: Wear long ones so you can rock some bomb-ass fleece-lined leggings underneath. I was so toasty, you don't even know. But you could. If you got a maxi skirt and fleece leggings.
Anyway, this was the first outfit I've worn in a long time that I really put effort into and liked. I hate how winter just saps all of my energy and creativity. Oh well, at least it's almost over!
And finally, in other news, if you follow me on Instagram or Twitter, my usernames have changed! They're easy to remember: @verbalmelange. Hooray, brand alignment!
sweater, slacks: thrifted
short-sleeve button-down: New York & Company
flats: Target
necklace: gifted (Kate Spade)
Welp, you're looking at a pretty close approximation of my outfits all this week: sweater, a layer under it, warm dress pants and flats that are easy to throw in my bag while I wear my heavier winter boots. Because all week, temps have been in the teens or single digits, with negative-degree wind chills. Yesterday morning, the actual temp was -6 Fahrenheit, with a wind chill of -22! It's not okay, guys. I'm too delicate for this bitter winter clime.
But I haven't been letting the chill get me down too much. I layer fleece-lined leggings under my pants for the walk home from the bus stop. (Matt, who works second shift during the week, is a saint who drives me to work every morning in his well-warmed-up car.) I have my rated-to-20-degree boots that perform well enough even when the temps are below 20. And I have a killer long down jacket I got at the end of last winter from Burlington Coat Factory. I'm even managing to make it to the gym most evenings! If you know anything about me, you know that's a feat even in nicer weather. So I guess I can't complain too much.
In other news (cue abrupt subject change), our wedding is exactly four months from today! I still have so much to do...cutting wine bottles for our centerpiece vases, making the flower-petal candle holders for our other centerpieces, assembling all the flowers we made, making my veil, doing my dress fitting(s), designing and printing our invitations and other miscellaneous stationery, doing final meetings with the few pros we did hire to confirm all the details...eesh. It's gonna be a very busy four months. I can't think about the big picture too much, or I get super stressed out and panicky. I just have to take things in baby steps: This weekend is devoted to bottle-cutting and editing some photos from a newborn session I had the other weekend. Keep it small and manageable, that's my motto :)
How do you deal with massive projects? And while we're doing the whole ask-questions-at-the-end-of-the-post-to-encourage-feedback thing, are the temps abysmally cold where you are, too? How do you even handle that? (I'm thinking of you, Sydney, up in what I can only assume is the frozen tundra of Canada. I'm shivering just thinking about it.)
For constantly being sick, apparently. Or at least, that seems to be the case for me lately.
t-shirt: Old Navy
cardigan: thrifted
skinnies: The Limited via Discount Fashion Warehouse
boots: Target
necklace: Express via DFWh
I wound up leaving work after just a couple of hours today; I developed a nasty cold at the end of last week that left me with what feels like a face full of cotton. Congestion and stopped-up ears, hurrah! I thought an ear infection was settling in too, but apparently it's not quite that bad yet. Just in case, I've been wrapped up on my couch all day with Star Trek and some wedding crafts to keep me company.
I always feel like my posts have too much blabbering about random stuff and not enough about the actual outfits I'm posting. This outfit was an unusual choice for me; I don't usually like to layer like colors, like I did with this top and cardigan. But I think I like it here; it's hard to see, but the darker stripes in the t-shirt almost perfectly match the cardi, without being too overt.
Welp, I'm also using today to catch up on start my Christmas shopping. Usually I'm pretty on top of it, but this year I've gotten an unfortunately late start. All I can say is, thank god for Amazon Prime, amiright?
t-shirt: Old Navy
jacket/blazer: thrifted
skinnies: Forever 21
flats: Target
necklace: gifted Kate Spade
That's right; the weather outside certainly is frightful. We got our first real snow of the season last night; now there's an inch or two of icy/slushy/powdery mix on the ground. Delightful (not). Get ready for these wonderfully lit outdoor alley shots (from last month) to disappear; it's time for me to make the switch to shooting indoors. Womp womppppp.
Also frightful this weekend was my intense anxiety level. I had probably the worst shopping experience of my life on Saturday, when I tried to buy a corset for under my wedding dress. Seriously guys, if you need a quick fix for hating yourself and your body, I highly recommend corset shopping for two hours. I apparently have weird proportions, so everything that fit around my stomach wound up giving me awkward and heartbreaking armpit fat, which apparently is a real thing. And everything that avoided the apparently-a-thing armpit fat was way too big in the stomach. I wound up buying a strapless bra and a stomach-only corset piece thing (kind of like this, only it goes from your bra line down to your hips, not from your waist down past your hips). They were way more than I wanted to spend, but I'll at least be able to wear both of them under other outfits. Plus, I now get to go up to my grandma's house and try on the dress again (I have to make sure the undergarments work, of course!) so it's not a total loss.
Then Saturday night, I had a host of wedding nightmares. Awful stress dreams about not having a dress at all (I walked down the aisle in a gray maxi dress and a cardigan), about being in the wrong venue, about the music not playing right during the ceremony...basically, everything was just wrong. Then I got a text from my sister; a fire on campus at our alma mater had destroyed the apartment I lived in my junior year. It was an attic studio apartment above a flower shop, and the entire attic just collapsed into the apartment below it. I was devastated; I had a lot of great memories in that apartment. Obviously the situation is so much worse for the students who are living there now; they lost everything they own. I'll be donating to the university's fund for them; if you have some extra cash lying around and want to do a little good with it, you can do the same here. Just select the "Ohio Parents and Family Endowment."
So between bad shopping experiences and dreams and sad news, my Sunday was shaping up to be a huge sulk-fest. But then I went to a meeting for a new project I'm working on and it honestly turned my entire day around. I left feeling excited, optimistic and refreshed. I don't want to go into too much detail on the project, because I'm honestly a little terrified that my contribution will be terrible, but if all goes well I'll divulge more in the spring.
Aaaaand that was my weekend. Here's hoping yours had more high points than low ones!
Okay, yesterday things got a bit heavy and I was/am dealing with some triggers. I'd be lying if I said I'm feeling back to 100% normal, but my motto is "fake it till ya make it" so I'm just gonna do that. We now return to your regularly scheduled frivolity.
t-shirt: thrifted
jeans, flats: Target
belt: H&M
necklace: Jane
In other news, I am so so relieved to finally be showing some fairly sharp pics again on the blog. I think I've finally figured out the weirdness I was experiencing, namely that I had changed my focus area settings without realizing it and was messing around with pre-focusing my camera on a stationary object instead of letting the remote focus for me because apparently my cheapo remote does that. That noise you hear is me cheering, obvs. And okay, maybe these still aren't totally perfect but they're such a vast improvement from the entirely-out-of-focus-crap I've been shooting that I don't even care.
I don't usually tuck my t-shirts into my jeans because hello, nerd alert but honestly, the pearls kind of give it more of a ladylike vibe than a dorky one, I think. Plus, leopard print. Speaking of, this is an H&M belt so obviously it is falling apart after like a year of ownership, so I am in desperate need of a replacement. Never thought I'd be saying that about something with leopard print on it, but there you go. So, a call-out: Has anyone seen something like this belt recently, at a reasonable price?
dress: thrifted
cardi: Express via Discount Fashion Warehouse
heels: secondhand
necklace: giveaway win
belt: Target
And the parade of not-quite-focused outfit photos continues! Two of these didn't turn out so bad, but I wound up way-overcorrecting on the other two, so they're noisy instead of unfocused. Thankfully, I think (hope!) I've figured out a solution to this annoyance. I still have three outfits in my queue, but two are not quite as bad as they have been and the third was shot by my friend Emily who actually knows how to handle a camera.
In other news, I think this might be the most inexpensive fancy-dress outfit I've worn in a long time. Granted, the thrifted dress is only a basic H&M sheath dress, but those shoes are from my friend Hayley who always buys quality kicks. (They might be Nine West?) The necklace was originally from Nordstrom, and the super-discounted Express sweater just pulls it all together. Talk about getting the look for less, amiright?
In other other news, I had another mini-wedding-freakout today! Hooray! It occurred to me that I have to send out save the dates this month, which means I have to get about a billion addresses and, you know, DIY the dang things with photos Emily shot of Matt and I the other weekend and this magnet DIY tutorial. But before I do all that, Matt and I have to really, truly, actually finalize our guest list. When we first made it, we just kind of threw everyone we know onto the list. Even people we haven't seen/talked to in months. Uhhh, yeah. Not the best way to go about it, really. Ugh. Can I just clone myself for the next nine months (and five days, not that I'm counting) so one Emma can go to work and earn enough money to pay for the wedding, while the other Emma plans and DIYs the dang thing? Pretty please?
(Yes, short post today, but check back later this evening for an update on wedding dress shopping this weekend, if you're interested in that sort of thing. There will be pictures.)
blouse: thrifted
blazer: Express via Discount Fashion Warehouse
skirt: The Limited
flats: Target
necklace: Jane.com
So I was inspired to re-create this outfit, originally worn by Ashley of The Cream To My Coffee, the second I saw it on her blog. Part of it was the fact that I knew I had all the pieces to do so, but mostly it was just a cool-looking combination that I was excited to try. In retrospect, I'm wishing I had added my thin black belt to the skirt, or untucked a little of the shirt to spill over the waistband. Oh, well.
Unfortunately, the zipper on this skirt broke shortly after I wore this. Well, it didn't so much "break" as "get caught in the material next to the zipper, tear it to shreds and basically become inseparable from it." I'm debating whether I want to remove the zipper and try to sew in a new one. Has anyone tried this? Is it hard?
Yes, warm weather is finally making a comeback here in Ohio, after what felt like the most brutal winter in my personal memory and what started out as the dreariest spring. Don't get me wrong, we're still getting plenty of those spring showers, but at least the temps are helping facilitate outdoor shoots again. Actually, I have three outfits hanging in my closet to re-shoot on days that don't involve copious amounts of rain, but I'm hoping to tackle those this weekend.
shirt: The Limited via Discount Fashion Warehouse
cardigan: thrifted
skinnies, flats: Target
So anyway, here I am back in the good ol' alley behind my house. Recycling bins and weird looks from neighbors included. I DGAF, I'm just happy for sunshine and days that are conducive to being outside, regardless of whether I'm shooting for the blog, riding Perdita, or just sitting on the porch eating dinner.
Are you experiencing similar joy at the better-late-than-never arrival of spring this year? How are you celebrating its return?
Sometimes, I sit down to write a blog post and feel like I have literally nothing to say. Maybe it seems like this happens frequently, because I often blather on about nothing in particular around these parts, but most of the time my blathering is semi-planned or constructed. Days like today, though, the blinking cursor just kind of mocks me.
It's times like this that I wonder whether Verbal Mélange has a shelf life, an expiration date. My three-year bloggiversary came and went with little fanfare, and while on one hand it seems like an accomplishment (three years of committing to a thing!), it also kind of seems like a pretty weird thing to celebrate (three years of talking about and posting pictures of myself!). The reason behind the lack of fanfare--because if there's anything I love, it's making a big deal out of things--is that April is triple anniversary month for me, and two of the three (my start date with my current job and more importantly, Matt's and my dating-anniversary) land at the end of the month. So I tend to mentally lump the blog anniversary at the end too, even though it's really in the beginning.
Anyway, where I was going before that tangent about anniversaries: I've been doing a lot of thinking about VM and what it is now vs. what I originally envisioned it to be vs. what it's evolving into. But that's a post for another day, I think.
So much for said "writer's block," I suppose. Funny how that works.
And just to give your eyeballs a little visual stimulation, here's a fairly nondescript representation of what I've been wearing a lot lately: plain tee, cardi, slacks, flats. Warm weather, where art thou?
t-shirt: Old Navy
cardi, flats: Target
slacks: thrifted
necklace: Jane.com
Man, girls have it so easy for business casual wear, it isn't even funny. "Business casual" for dudes means ties and Oxfords, but I can wear a t-shirt as long as I dress it up with layers and a statement necklace. I kind of love it. (And to guys who may be tempted to complain about the unfairness of this double standard, I have two phrases for you: "gender pay gap" and "glass ceiling.")
So I spent most of my lunch break today pinning various silk flowers from afloral.com to a hidden Pinterest board (because probably no one following me cares to see a billion variations of the same anemone/peony/dahlia/ranunculus clusters, amiright?) and now I feel completely overwhelmed by flowers. I mean, I know I'd be spending $1,000+ more if I go with a professional florist, especially because our wedding is the same weekend as Mother's Day. But seriously, I know nothing about how to make a floral arrangement look good. And now I'm a teensy bit freaked out at the prospect of figuring it out. Halp.
In other news, I found an older, colder-weather outfit in my queue of outfit photos. Originally this post was supposed to have a "thank god that's behind us" slant, but the forecast for tomorrow includes an inch of snow and I basically am just about ready to give up on the hope of ever seeing a live tulip in my yard again.
sweater, slacks: thrifted
blouse: The Limited via Discount Fashion Warehouse
flats: Target
necklace: Etsy
But, as I promised Sydney on Instagram, I shan't complain. After all, our temp range tomorrow is gonna be a whopping 40/28 Fahrenheit, which is a bit warmer than her 1/-6 Celsius. But (and this is not complaining) seriously. Nature. Wat r u doing? Nature. Stahp.
